I have no doubt she thought we were talking rather nicely. “Oh!” said I, and waved the cream biscuit thing. “You challenge me to dissect you.”
“Well?”
“And that is precisely what I cannot do.”
“I’m afraid you are very satirical,” she said, with a touch of disappointment. She is always saying that when our conversation has become absolutely idiotic—as it invariably does. I felt an inevitable desire to quote bogus Latin to her. It seemed the very language for her.
“Malorum fiducia pars quosque libet,” I said, in a low voice, looking meaningly into her eyes.
“Ah!” she said, colouring a little, and turned to pour hot water into the teapot, looking very prettily at me over her arm as she did so.
“That is one of the truest things that has ever been said of sympathy,” I remarked. “Don’t you think so?”
“Sympathy,” she said, “is a very wonderful thing, and a very precious thing.”
“You speak,” said I (with a cough behind my hand), “as though you knew what it was to be lonely.”
“There is solitude even in a crowd,” she said, and looked round at the six other people—three discreet pairs—who were in the room.